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GMGruman writes "Bill Snyder warns that the tech patent wars are going nuclear, and could vaporize tech jobs in the process. He likens the situation to medicine, where so much money now goes to pay for insurance and 'defensive medicine,' rather than for actual care. In the tech world, he fears that the same will occur with patents, forcing companies to spend ever more money on patents and lawyers — and less on innovation and staff."

The bright side is that the people who innovated to make the patents are being compensated for their efforts. This is how patents motivate people to innovate. Would you prefer if Google could use other people's innovations without compensating them?

The bright side is that the people who innovated to make the patents are being compensated for their efforts.

Are they, now? Please show me a list of wealthy inventors, and not just wealthy patent holders.

GP said "the people who innovated to make the patents". That's the clever patent attorneys who made new and clever arguments as to why the invention was worthy of a patent, right? So he should be pointing you to a list of wealthy patent attorneys, not wealthy inventors.

Would you prefer if Google could use other people's innovations without compensating them?

Yes. I am an innovator. To build something truly useful, I must build upon the work of at least twelve others. If I have to pay royalties to them all, there's no way the royalties I collect will ever cover it. But I don't do it for the money. I do it because I am an innovator. I will innovate if I am compensate. I will innovate if I am not compensated. I will innovate even if I have to pay for the privilege of using my own brain. Google has demonstrated that they are (to some extent) of the same stock as me, and I think we'd all make more progress if we could pursue our passion to innovate without fear. If those who only innovate for money abandoned the game, that's okay with me--they are lousy innovators anyway.

Do you spend 100s of millions of dollars on research to formulate new ideas and then bring them to market? Would you be able to afford to do that in a world where everyone freely copied your ideas and took them to market preventing you from ever recovering investment.

Your message sounds nice, how about some concrete examples. Show off some of the inovations you are talking about. Your post is interesting philosophy. It doesn't actually say anything.

Wouldn't it be great if most patents actually reflected 100's of millions of dollars of research?

In the industry where I work (video games) there are patents on1. Playing 2 sounds at once when the player hits one button.2. A big arrow pointing to where the player needs to go (the "Crazy Taxi" patent).3. The entire idea of haptic feedback when applied to game controllers.4. Changing the strength of an attack based upon how many enemies are clumped in an area.5. Cloud-based gaming. All of it.

And there are literally thousands more, that cover every aspect of gaming from how you can score players to how you can monitor their inputs. Most of them are good ideas. All of them are obvious (Big Arrow pointing where you need to go). None of them took any actual money to develop whatsoever. And taken as a whole, they're grossly stifling.

If the patent system is to reach the original goal of protecting major investments in research, we need to get back to that. Because at the moment, the patent system just rewards people who file patents for anything, then sue everyone else.

Do you spend 100s of millions of dollars on research to formulate new ideas and then bring them to market? Would you be able to afford to do that in a world where everyone freely copied your ideas and took them to market preventing you from ever recovering investment.

It's called competition. Why don't lawyers ask for patents on court strategies? After all, by not doing so their peers can steal those strategies and win cases without paying the original inventor of that strategy a single penny. And yet the entire lawyer profession hasn't imploded yet due to no one being interested anymore in helping their clients to the best of their abilities even though everyone else can look at how they argued the case.

First off the amount of money you spent on R&D has little correlation with the value of the invention. The market places more value on Snuggie for Dogs than millions in research spent on New Coke.

Take some industries that don't have IP such as restaurants and fashion. There is lots of innovation and money being made with no laws to protect ideas. In fact it speeds up innovation since all resources are brought to bear on staying innovative and not playing the legal game.

Actually, once all the tech jobs are wiped out then there won't be any new tech to patent, and the companies will implode.Once the owners of the patents all implode and the FSF owns all the patents, having bought them for haypennies on the dollar, tech inventers can resume inventing.

Since the patent minefield is such that nothing new can be made without stepping on at least one patent, the FSF can ensure any new megacorps have to enter a cross license. The end result is that the FSF will own or have a license for *all* tech patents./dreaming-nB

You assume the tech patent holders care about what they leave in their wake.
If it implodes they will take their money and schemes elsewhere. Holy shit, just look at the pharma industry.
Have a heart condition that requires our pill to save your life? That will be $500 per pill, why that much? Because we can, and fuck you for living.

No, it has to do with recouping the costs of development and testing. Wikipedia has [wikipedia.org] the estimated cost of producing a new drug in the US, which it says may be in the range of $55 million to $800 million (US). Different studies seem to disagree with one another about the costs.

Regardless, drug companies patent the drug prior to clinical trials [wikipedia.org]. It can take up to 6 years in R&D to develop a new drug, and another 8 years in clinical trials (that's the clinical trial period for cancer drugs). Lets say they get their patent 2 years before starting clinical trials. That means they only have 10 years to reclaim their R&D costs until their patent runs out (patent length of 20 years). Once the patent runs out, generic versions of the drug can be made and the original pharma will make much less money on the drug. Plus you have to take into account how many people will be purchasing your drug when setting the price. If it was something like cold medicine, you can charge less since you'll get a ton of customers. Cancer and heart medication is going to have fewer consumers, which means higher costs are required to recoup the R&D and testing costs.

I don't disagree with you that pharma probably charge way too much for their drugs, but you have to keep in mind that the cost of bringing a new drug to the market is very expensive.

Most of the costs imposed by the government are for things like trials to ensure that the drug works and doesn't kill people. Are you seriously suggesting we should just get rid of those and return to the days of snake oil sales?

It did not cost taht much 10 years ago and no they do not do 5x as much R&D. Celebrex is as powerful as an asprin yet costs $$$$. Yet people seeing these commercials on TV want it and you and I both pay for it by our premiums. Fuck them.

They are price gouging and using patents to abuse their power. Their margins are well in the thousands of percents.

Calm down, the writer you're referring to is simply misspelling a word he's only heard and never seen written.

Ha'penny [merriam-webster.com] is an abbreviation for "half penny" [merriam-webster.com], a coin worth 1/2 cent. According to a quick wikipedia check [wikimedia.org] ha'pennies have been minted in Great Britain (including Ireland and Scotland), Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (probably not an exhaustive list). Half penny coins were also issued before decimalization (i.e. before a penny was 1/100 of anything, becoming a "cent"), with varied va

Now there's an arms race in the technology industry, with patents playing the role of ICBMs. "Patents are emerging as a new currency," Alexander I. Poltorak, chief executive of the patent licensing and enforcement firm General Patent, told the New York Times. "I've recently received several calls from financial analysts and bankers who want to know how to value patents and what does it mean."

I think there's a lot of truth to what he's saying, but Mr. Poltorak clearly has a vested interest in a patent war, or at least fear of a patent war.

I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it? I thought its selling point was that it was essentially free to carriers. The App Market can't be pulling in that much, can it? I feel like I'm missing something here.

"I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it?"I'm not sure that's the issue. I'd be more willing to bet it is more to do with perceived future control of the platform.Imagine there was no android and that there were no PCs, everything done through tablets, mobile phones, set top boxes games consoles etc. Assume they are all sufficiently well integrated that it would work too. What platform do they run? Their

I'm not sure that's the issue. I'd be more willing to bet it is more to do with perceived future control of the platform.

No, no, no. You're missing the point entirely. Google makes money by having eyes on the internet. Doesn't matter how those eyes get there. Windows, Lunix, iOS, Android? They don't care. All of these increase the number of eyes on the internet at any given time. Google loves a competitive smart phone industry. That competitiveness drives innovation, again increasing the number of people accessing the interenet. The danger that Android averts is a locked down system like iOS. Steve Jobs controls who can acces

I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it?

Yes, it can, even if not directly. Consider how important the mobile environment is and the disadvantages Google's profit-making operations aside from Android would be if the mobile space was a virtual iOS monopoly. Google needs Android to stop someone else (the short-term threat would be Apple) monopolizing the mobile space and being able to charge rents to onlin

I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it?

This lack of understanding is exactly why we're in this patent mess in the first place. Google makes money by having eyes on the internet. Anything they do that increases the number of eyes on the internet makes Google money. Google makes money despite giving SO MUCH of what they have created (innovated) for free. Actually they pay money for people to use what they have created, bandwidth, servers, support systems, etc... Google is the perfect example of using the free market to make money rather than relyi

From a systems perspective the system is designed to requrie a lawyer. And the lawyers are in control of that requirement.Until negative feedback can be applied somehow this system is just going to keep on requireing more lawyers.

I'm a lawyer; are you going to shoot me? If so, are you going to do it to my face or are you going to shoot me in the back? Will you allow me to arm myself first, or will you eliminate your risk by making sure I'm unarmed? If I wrestle the gun away from you, do you think I am justified in shooting you with it? I'm really curious about your philosophy.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." is a meme dating back to (at least) Shakespeare. Type "kill all " into Google and "kill all the lawyers" is the FIRST result. Perhaps society at large has felt for hundreds of years (and continues to feel) that your profession is a blight, a pox, a cancer on society. There's a REASON that most politicians tend to be lawyers: because they're snakes by nature.

Look, we're tarring with a single brush, but it really isn't that broad. Fact is, your industry is doing serious damage to our society, and profiting from the damage. That is reasonable cause for some pretty serious backlash.

You may be innocent, you may be one of the good guys. Maybe you are working to fix the problem. Maybe you are not, but you have convinced yourself that being a part of the system does not mean you condone it. Maybe you work in a corner of law that is not quite so seriously screwed up by your kin. If one of those things is the case, and that is enough for you, then relax, we're not talking about you.

If you want us to believe that lawyers, in general, are not worthy of society's scorn, well, simple fact is you are wrong, and it is not going to happen.

If you want us to express fondness for you, despite your profession, then you've got to tell us why you are not part of the problem. Same treatment you would get if you were a congressman or an Abu Ghraib guard.

This is how cultures deal with internal threats that cannot be easily handled through official channels. We ostracize them. You can get special dispensation, but you have to ask for it, and explain why you deserve it.

Newp, I don't have to tell you a damned thing. I'm a lawyer because I got a degree and took a qualifying exam. You have no idea what I'm doing with my life; I could be tending lepers in the South Sea, bartending, working on a commercial fishing boat, etc. "Lawyer" just means I have a license.

You don't really understand the meaning of the word. "Lawyer" has a legal meaning; licensed to practice law. That's pretty much it. A guy who has been cleaning stables for 50 years but maintained his license is a lawyer. A guy who researches and writes for a law firm is not if he failed the bar.

You don't really understand the meaning of the word. "Lawyer" has a legal meaning;

You are being deliberately obtuse. This is not a meeting of the bar association, it is a public discussion forum. If your intent is to recant your initial statement, because you did not realize this was not a meeting of the bar association, I will not fault you for it.

Deliberately (and theatrically) obtuse is in his job description. That's what his original complaint against my (humorously intended) ".357 magnum negative feedback" was, and what his arguments against you continue to be. You're just "wrasslin with a tarbaby". He'll continue to parse nits and play word games with you all day. He's done more to prove my "lawyers are parasitic lying scum" thesis than I could. My advice to you is to let him have the last whiny lying weasel word and move on with your day.

It's a metaphor for "you're a leech of society and you and your kind should disappear from it". Or you're just trying to justify your carrier choice and kid yourself into thinking that you have an honourable profession ?

Possibly trying to trip you into saying something he can sue you over?

IANAL and I am not sure I understand the metaphor either. It was a very specific threat. First kill all the lawyers is one thing. Describing your means of doing so is going to another, more disturbing, level.

IANAL and I am not sure I understand the metaphor either. It was a very specific threat. First kill all the lawyers is one thing. Describing your means of doing so is going to another, more disturbing, level.

I wasn't the one who brought up a.357 magnum. I only provided a tongue-in-cheek speculation on what a.357 magnum might be a metaphor for.

There's still time to get a non-lawyer job. Some of us actually invent stuff. I have no use for patents, as they seem to exist solely to give jobs to lawyers, and to induce large corporations to employ large numbers of lawyers.

Fer cryin' out loud - your UID says you've been online long enough to know about this phenomenon [ohinternet.com]

Now all that said? Seriously - your profession does leave a whole hell of a lot to be desired, all things considered. So while I certainly do not condone the GP's proposed action, I can easily understand why he expressed the sentiments.

Since you are a lawyer you are already heavily armed. You have the complete police state and the monopoly of the legal use of the instigation of violence at your disposal. What? Did you think people comply with your insane laws and judgements for any other reason?

I am going to intervene to make an obvious point. You are wrong. Laws against murder and manslaughter are quite recent. Before that you had blood feuds and honor killings. Lawyers are the reason that legitimate companies settle disputes in court while the mob and drug dealers use guns. They are why most people in the developed world (and a majority of Americans) don't need to know how to kill intruders. In many countries, like Apartheid South Africa, lawyers are often heroes in defence of civil rights.

"But I don't understand why you should be involved so much in society's business and paid SO MUCH more than people who also play critical roles in society, such as garbage men."

Lawyers actually make, on average, about what most people with similar education levels make (and less than some) (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm#earnings). Even these numbers are inflated right now, standard starting salary for someone just out of law school (or after 7 years of higher education) is about 50k, though a lot

The number of lawyers on the market has no effect on the hourly rates of those practicing because the new graduates don't compete with the older ones, and unless they are one of the tiny minority able to get into a law firm partner track they never will. If it did we would already noticed a big drop in hourly rates because of the huge increase in law graduates over the past 10 years. Hasn't happened.

This is really a small part of a huge problem in America, and the rest of the world. Although I can see the case for patents, the system has become so corrupted, that it no longer serves its original purpose. It is now a tool to stifle innovation, restrict competition, and funnel wealth to the wealthiest. Companies have to put more and more resources are being put into non-productive purposes. Instead of hiring 1000 more people, they have to hire 50 lawyers to fight patent suits. America is turning into a c

Patients can and do support innovation. The thing is that like everything else they can abused and some patients should never have been awarded.Software and process patients didn't exist for the a long time. That changed in the 1990s and that is when things got nuts. Before then you used copyright to protect software which to me is logical.You can look at software patients from two sides.Take VisiCalc for instance. It was the first spreadsheet for microcomputers and some say the first at all. Had their been

There is nothing intellectually different between a physical item and virtual item (hardware vs. software). A difference is trying to be manufactured for the sake of legal leverage against laws written back in the time when everything was "physical". The exact same bullsh*t is taking place in the physical world with regards to patents as there is in the virtual one. It is a grave societal injustice that we have to waste our resources inventing new solutions to old and solved prerequisites before we can g

Look, just because one of the world's most powerful companies tried to create new mobile products, and wound up having to pay $12.5 billion to be allowed the privilege is no reason to overreact. You see, $12.5 billion barriers to entry are good for innovation. Massive government fiat barriers to entry encourage entrenched incumbency, and entrenched incumbents are very inventive. Just look at the iPod and iPhone. Both of those devices are being produced by a company that is now the entrenched incumbent in th

Both [the iPod and iPhone] are being produced by a company that is now the entrenched incumbent in the space, so it must have been an entrenched incumbent that invented them. Q.E.D.

'zat a little more obvious now?

My statement that $12.5 billion barriers to entry enhance innovation was meant to be equally obviously sarcastic. Barriers to entry are specifically interesting in economics because they cause the market to distort away from comp

Outsourcing killed manufacturing jobs while leaving engineers relatively unscathed. However, the patent bubble WILL cost engineers their jobs. I'm not trying to be condescending or start a pissing contest on the importance of manufacturing jobs versus engineering jobs, I just think it's important to make the distinction so that the issue can be planned accordingly.

The USA is run by lawyers, MBAs and marketing people. The fix we're in is exactly what you would expect, given who is in charge. From now on, I'm only voting for scientists and engineers. Liberal ones only, of course.

this is how everyone makes blu ray players or apple breaks into the cell phone market. you pool your patents into a consortium, cross license and for every device you sell you pay a fee back into the consortium that gets paid to all the members. just like the wifi consortium

a lot of these lawsuits have nothing to do with networking but with things like memory management and camera software. if apple or HTC doesn't want to pay kodak they should just write their own algorithms

if apple or HTC doesn't want to pay kodak they should just write their own algorithms

So what happens when they do write their own algorithm and then some troll climbs out from under the bridge and says 'no, that's no good, I patented adding numbers together on a computer, you owe me a bazillion dollars'?

if apple or HTC doesn't want to pay kodak they should just write their own algorithms

So what happens when they do write their own algorithm and then some troll climbs out from under the bridge and says 'no, that's no good, I patented adding numbers together on a computer, you owe me a bazillion dollars'?

Now that's just unfair example. I think there's prior art on that from the '60's. The troll would need to innovate to get a patent, he'd need to patent something like "adding numbers together on a mobile computer". It's not like you can patent just anything, you have at least combine words in a new way...

To be clear, take it for what it's worth but the malpractice data is sourced from Stanford which relies on opinions and research from the Hoover Institution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Institution) a Conservative and Libertarian think tank. If ideology filled rhetoric is to be propagated, it should at least be identified. Similarly, I feel that Bill Snyder is tainting his perspective with a Conservative anti-small business, pro-corporate ideology. Patent law exists to protect smaller businesses

If medical malpractice insurance is the author's example of Armageddon, then things could certainly be worse.

According to mymedicalmalpracticeinsurance.com [mymedicalm...urance.com], malpractice liability insurance for a general surgeon in Texas is in the neighborhood of $50-60K per year. That is a very small percentage of the total income from all of the surgeries done by that surgeon. Other types of physicians have different rates, but they all amount to a similar small percentage compared to the total fees for services rende

The whole concept of property is the ownership of a particular scarce resource such as land or object. The main word is scarce. It is something that your use precludes me using it. If you eat my cake I can't eat it. If you build a something on my land I can't build in it's place.

Ideas are not scarce. In fact they are the exact opposite. Ideas can be copied infinitely without destroying any copies.

The phrase "Intellectual Property" is an attempt to claim an idea is property which it can never be.

You have to recognize patents for what the are. Government granted monopolies on ideas. They should be eliminated. Great ideas have a natural monopoly based on how much of a technological leap they are because it takes the competition time and money to catch up.

If we didn't have patents, few companies would innovate and there would be little reason to spend the tons of money to develop the infrastructure and retail cell phone handsets.

After all, we have all those nice sturdy 5 pount black MaBell rotary dial phones. What else do we NEED!

People who might be bitching about losing a job (at HP, RIMM for instance or MotoM) merely decided to work for a company that decided to follow rather than diligently keep up or LEAD. In some cases they seem to have ignored the factual information coming from both engineers and the marketplace on both hardware speed and ecosystem, in the case of HP.

These things are NOT the fault of the patent system. They are the fault of top management and key engineering decisions.

I wasn't lack of patents that held progress back, Bell had a government-granted MONOPOLY on the taxpayer-funded phone system, to the point where phones had to be rented from Bell itself. Then when 3rd party phones started becoming available, Bell argued they shouldn't be allowed to connect because it might damage the phone network. The telecom space was not free-market by any stretch.

Between the best minds in the US being sucked up by the parasites in Wall Street and massive numbers increase in the number of law students (*) it really does look like the Empire is in the middle of its last greed-fuelled explosion, close to the point of spectacularly imploding in upon itself. Only the decay will likely be slower more insidious than that.